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Anthony Marra Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Anthony Marra
Photo: Smeeta Mahanti

Anthony Marra

How to pronounce Anthony Marra: First syllable of last name rhymes with bar

Anthony Marra Biography

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award.



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Interview

Anthony Marra and Amor Towles discuss Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents and the real-world events and family history that inspired it.

A Conversation Between Anthony Marra and Amor Towles

Amor Towles: Tony, can you start by giving us a brief overview of the novel?

Anthony Marra: Frank Lloyd Wright once said that if you tip the world on its side, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. This was never more true than it was in the 1930s and '40s, when thousands of European émigrés and exiles landed in LA. Many ended up working at the margins of Hollywood. You had internationally renowned playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, who struggled to churn out B-movie potboilers. You had German Jewish actors who, because of their accents, could only find work portraying the very Nazis they thought they had escaped. This community of exiles became foundational to the US movie propaganda apparatus during the war, even though, as citizens of Axis-aligned countries, they were branded enemy aliens and denied the very rights and freedoms that their movies championed.

This is the broader world of Mercury Pictures Presents. And its story is about how such an unlikely group of people arrived to such an unlikely place and ended up transforming American culture.

I wanted to investigate this community through the perspective of a character named ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Anthony Marra at BookBrowse
Mercury Pictures Presents jacket The Tsar of Love and Techno jacket A Constellation of Vital Phenomena jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Anthony Marra but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

We recommend 31 similar authors


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